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Overview
From all over Europe—Scotland to the Mediterranean, Hungary to Cornwall—Elisabeth Luard has collected descriptions of traditional feasts and festivals, many of which she has experienced first hand, and hundreds of recipes for the dishes appropriate to them.
As well as being a unique and wonderfully readable cookbook, Seasonal European Dishes (previously published as European Festival Food) is written with the scrupulous attention to detail and authenticity that is the hallmark of Elisabeth Luard’s food writing. The recipes are peppered with hundreds of fascinating anecdotes and little known facts about local history and folklore.
Starting with December, the book is organized according to the months of the year, and so it importantly also reminds us of the cycle of seasonality that is now once again regarded as the natural and much more enjoyable way to shop and eat.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781909808690 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grub Street |
| Publication date: | 02/20/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 344 |
| File size: | 817 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
December
CHRISTMAS AND NEW YEAR: WINTER FESTIVALS OF RENEWAL
Our Christmas and New Year celebrations mark a festival of renewal which has survived for at least 4,000 years. When we welcome the anniversary of the birth of the Christ Child with evergreens, blazing logs and an exchange of gifts, we lay offerings on the tombstones of our most ancient and dangerous gods.
In Mesopotamia, 2,000 years before the Christian era, the New Year was celebrated with a twelve-day festival. Plays, fires and present-giving marked the yearly victory of Marduk, god of spring and new birth, over the forces of winter darkness. Bonfires were lit to strengthen the sun. Evergreens decorated dwellings, a reminder to the barren twigs and unborn seeds that they must soon sprout and grow. Farmers went out into the empty winter fields, banging drums and shouting to frighten away malevolent spirits. The Romans, those powerful arbiters of custom, replaced the winter solstice celebrations with the Saturnalia, the winter festival of Saturn the god of agriculture, who was in his turn overthrown by great Jupiter – wargod and ruler of the skies.
In the lineaments of the Roman Saturnalia can be traced the outlines of our modern Christmas and New Year festivals; friends visited each other, taking with them good luck presents of fruits, cakes, candles, clay dolls, grains of frankincense, and gold and silver ornaments. Masters feasted with their slaves, who were allowed free licence and could wear the pointed hat of the freeman. A Mock King of the Revels was appointed – of which our Christmas-cracker paper hats and crowns are a reminder. In the streets the common people danced in animal skins, their faces blackened. December 25th in the old Julian calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar to replace the Egyptian and Chinese moon-phase calendar, marked the turning point of the year, when the sun was at its lowest and weakest.
In Persia, the triumph of Mithras – custodian of daylight and lord of the shining heavens – was celebrated with thanksgiving fires as the sun started its climb back from the winter solstice. The rites of Mithraism share much with Christianity – particularly after the Persian god added wisdom and truth to his portfolio of attributes. Mithraism gave Christianity a good run for its money; by the second century AD it was the more popular religion – particularly among the Roman army, who exported their habits and beliefs throughout Imperial Rome's extensive colonies.
Meanwhile, the northern barbarians of Europe were keeping their own similar festival of Yule, its practice adapted to local requirements. In the cold winter, logs were burned in honour of Odin and Thor; people drank mead (fermented honey water) and huddled round the bonfires, listening to the story-tellers retelling the old legends. Mistletoe and evergreens were cut and sacrifices were made to encourage new life.
We still burn the Yule log – although now, in our centrally-heated houses, it is often replaced with a log-shaped, decorated cake. In Britain, the flaming Christmas pudding does double duty as a symbol of fire and feasting. The true Yule log should burn for twelve days, and the stump must be kept for lighting the next year's log.
John Lawson, travelling in Greece in 1900, found paganism and Christianity in uneasy truce. 'Precautions had to be taken against the Centaurs or Callicatzari, who are active for the twelve days between Christmas and Epiphany. These creatures are malevolent, swift-footed beast-men with black faces, usually hairy, cloven-hoofed and half-goat or wolf or ass, half-man. They have large heads and priapic sexual organs.'
Christians had to mark a cross in black on the house door on Christmas Eve, on the jars and vessels which contained food, and on unbaptized infants. Precautions included lighting a fire and keeping it burning all through the twelve days, to prevent the wild men coming down the chimney. Lawson noted that one huge log was set on end up the chimney and allowed to go on burning for the whole period. Ground thistle, hyssop and asparagus were suspended at the door or by the chimney as magical charms against the marauders.
Patrick Leigh Fermor found things not much changed in the isolated Greek villages of the Mani peninsula in the 1950s:
A banished mythology was left to skulk and roam in the mountains, eventually, it was hoped, to die of neglect. But from a mixture of ancient awe and perhaps, Christian charity, the country people befriended them, and they are with us still. Lesser gods, rag tag and bobtail of the sea and woods, nymphs, nereids, dryads, oreads, gorons, tritons, satyrs, centaurs – ta paganá, outsiders. At Christmas, they try to break in from the outside and steal the roast pork and pancakes which is the Greek Christmas fare.
They are, Leigh Fermor observes, not seen as dangerous or destructive, but as trying to join in the festivities of the season.
In many places they are humorously tolerated and placated with left offerings. The invariable time for this yearly outburst is the twelve days between Christmas and Epiphany. This span includes the great winter feasts of the Dionysia (the most licentious) and the Kronia, and after the Roman Conquest, the imported Latin fasti of the Brumalia and the Kalendae.
The pagan celebrations were marked by orgies and human sacrifice. The concluding festival, the New Year feast, was transmuted into the Greek Kalends – some of whose customs can be traced in our modern Christmas festivities. The Roman emperor Trajan's colonization of Dacia left calinda as the Romanian word for Christmas carol. As Christianity gained ascendancy, the four Graeco-Roman feasts merged into twelve days of underground pagan kermesse – celebrations which, in the early years, re-surfaced regularly to trouble the early Fathers. St Paul's correspondent Bishop Timothy met his death attempting to suppress one such pagan outbreak.
The struggles of the early Church are echoed in the modern Greek Orthodox Church's deep distrust of 'folklore' and associated superstition – and in the Orthodox emphasis on Easter as the pure festival of renewal and rebirth, with Christmas taking third place in the calendar of festivals, behind the Feast of the Assumption. St John Chrysostom preached against the Kalendae in the fifth century. Basamon was still trying to suppress the celebration of the Kronia and Kalendae in the twelfth century, when drunken masqueraders even appeared in the nave of his church.
'It was the pagan, more than the indecent aspect – improper disguise and transvestism – which was the chief target of ecclesiastical anathema; men in women's clothes, women in men's, and mad drunkards dressed and horned as devils, their faces darkened or masqued, their bodies clad in goat-skin and simulating quadrupeds.' These tricks, Patrick Leigh Fermor points out, were different in no detail from the mummers who career through the streets of Greek towns and villages today, both at the identical magic period of the twelve days and during the Carnival that precedes Lent. That they also, within living memory, rampaged through the slumbering fields and orchards of northern Europe is testimony to their hold on the imaginations of men.
These pagan excesses still surface in the modern Carnival/Kermesse – now outlawed to the dark days of February, clenched between the twin fists of Epiphany, last of the Christmas feasts, and Lent, sombre pathway to Easter.
In Britain our Celtic ancestors left a garland of mistletoe, sacred to both the Druids and the Norsemen, to stake their claim on the modern celebrations. Until the arrival of the turkey from the New World, the traditional meal was the roast boar's head – the chosen sacrifice due to Frey, Norse goddess of fertility. The gleaming tusker, dressed with rosemary for the returning summer, with an apple in its mouth to symbolize the rebirth of the sun, was gilded and greeted with trumpets.
Christmas took a long time to settle into its slot on December 25th. By the third century AD there were various candidate dates for Christ's birthday. January 6th, the date of his baptism, was favoured, as it was thought he would have been baptized on the anniversary of his birth. In some eastern parts of Europe, January 6th is still celebrated as Christmas Day. December 25th was gradually settled on to coincide with the winter solstice, the Yule and the Saturnalia – with a nod also to the Jewish Feast of Lights, held on December 20th or 21st, and itself keyed into the winter solstice. The sixth-century chronologist Dionysius Exiguus was the first to try to calculate the exact date of Christ's birth – and he made an error of at least four years.
The several feasts of Christmas remained movable and regional throughout Europe until the twentieth century, when modern mass communications and centralization have succeeded in making conformists of us all. In central Europe the dates were still more or less in transition until the Second World War. In Bavaria and Austria the twelve days of Christmas ran from Christmas Day to Epiphany; in Silesia they were the twelve days preceding Christmas; in Mecklenburg the twelve days started on New Year's Day.
The hooligan demi-gods of Greece still cast long shadows, too. All over central and eastern Europe, Christmas and New Year remain a time for magic, witchcraft, and devil-animals. In Tyrol, in the 1950s, the Perchtenmasken, masked men dressed as devils, were still leaping around in the fields to make them fertile. In Britain up to the Second World War, people still went into the orchards around Christmas time and fired shots into the branches to scare away malevolent spirits. The poet Sacheverell Sitwell recalled, as war-clouds darkened the skies of Europe, similar scenes encountered on his pre-war travels. 'At Budaors, a village near Budapest, they celebrate the winter solstice with mimes and processions, the actors being known as regos in Hungary, turony in Slovakia, and turka in Roumania, feasts in honour of the victory of the sun god, and games and pantomimes of carnival, with shouting to drive away evil spirits, loud and discordant drumming, a relic of the ancient Shamanism.'
Károly Viski, reporting from Hungary in 1932, confirms that these minstrel-actors were respected professionals in 170 villages. Their part in the winter festival remained central long after the arrival of Christianity. Viski quotes a fifteenth-century Transylvanian writer: 'Immediately after the celebrations on the birthday of our Lord Jesus Christ, follows the great feast of the devil on Minstrel Monday, after that comes Carnival … minstrelsy never seeming to come to an end. Hungarian minstrelsy belongs to that group of customs which celebrated the winter solstice; that is the memory of the sun-god.'
The minstrels, singing of the magic stag of St Stephan or telling the riddle of the enchanted bull, can trace a direct line to the Shamans, the priests of the religion of the ancient Siberian tribes of northern Asia, who shared many of their beliefs with the Indians of North America. The Shaman foretold the future and combined the offices of doctor and magician, being capable of curing illness with incantations and songs.
The minstrels' traditional instruments include a 'singing drum' – an earthenware pot covered with a bladder pierced with a vibrating stick. Relics of the ancient cult make guest-appearances all over Europe. The singing drums are to be found on sale today in the Christmas markets of Andalusia, keeping company with wood-and-parchment gypsy tambourines.
Although both the Protestant and Roman Catholic Churches of Europe nominally rank Easter as the most important of the Church festivals, in practice their older and wiser congregations have long since dictated that Christmas comes first. The Orthodox Church, on the other hand, celebrates Easter as the major family festival of the Christian year – and makes comparatively little of Christmas. In non-conformist lands where the Church is at her most stern, particularly Scotland and the strongholds of the Lutheran Saxons, Christmas was until recently preserved as a holy day – secular feasting and merrymaking being considered inappropriate on such a day. Hogmanay, the festival of the New Year, remains the major winter celebration in Scotland, and it is this festivity which has inherited the ancient pagan trappings.
The Catholics of the romantic Mediterranean – and up into Hungary – have built up a fine tradition of religious celebrations for the Christmas period. Festivities include the traditional fasting supper of Christmas Eve, which reaches its apogee in Provence with sophisticated crib-scenes set up in the churches, and the performance of nativity plays on Christmas Eve. The cribs – known as Bethlehems – were inspired by the descriptions of early pilgrims returning from the Holy Land, who had seen the remnants of the manger in the famous rock cave at Bethlehem. In the seventh century Pope Theodosimus ordered that all the remaining Holy Land relics be brought to Rome, and this confirmed the custom of building little local 'Bethlehems' – rocky caves peopled with carved wooden kings, shepherds and animals paying homage to the Child and his family.
Later on real people began to replace the dolls, and gradually festive plays developed round the simple re-enactment of the story. As the secular imagination got to work, the plays began to wander off the subject. By the thirteenth century Pope Innocent III decided that they were profane enough to warrant banishment of all live performances from the churches. His contemporary, St Francis of Assisi, responded by taking the Bethlehem out into the forest of Greccio, where tame live animals were his cast. St Francis's two proselytizing orders, the Franciscans and the Poor Clares, made this 'mystery' popular wherever they established themselves. No doubt the sylvan celebrants of the Saturnalia would have been entertained by the apparent completion of their circle.
Our modern secular Christmas has grown into a voracious hybrid, capable of consuming such fearful gods as the hoary wolf-skin-cloaked Old Man Winter – and disgorging him as a chubby-cheeked round-bellied old gentleman in a red dressing-gown and cotton-wool bib. The Scandinavian tomte, saintly old Bishop Nicholas, the subterranean scarlet-eyed kallikantzaros of the Greeks, Attis's sacred fir-tree, the frantic orgies of the Romans, all have fed his iron digestion. It would not be surprising if the tender Babe in the manager was next on his menu.
ADVENT
Advent is the four weeks which lead up to Christmas. The First Sunday in Advent – the Sunday closest to November 30th – is the beginning of the Church's year, and marks the start of the Christmas festivities. In Sweden families go to church to sing carols and people decorate their homes and streets. In Germany the Advent wreath is hung in the window, and its four red candles are lit.
All over Europe a scattering of small ceremonies left over from the old pagan midwinter festivals prod sleeping Mother Earth into an awareness of the responsibilities. In Germany, on December 4th, St Barbara's Feast, cherry twigs are traditionally taken indoors and put in water so that they sprout in the warmth of the chimney-piece. Once a gentle nudge to Ceres's elbow, the new buds now form part of the Christmas celebration. On the same day in Provence, a handful of seed-corn must be scattered on a piece of wet flannel and set to germinate by the fire in time to decorate the table for the Christmas Eve fasting supper (see p 51). Further up the Rhône valley, in the high villages of the Baronnies and Vaison-la-Romaine, the sprouting grain is usually lentils – they have lovely little frizzy leaves. The buds may vary, but the sentiment is the same.
Italy and Catholic Europe have their own Advent ceremonies, keeping rather closer to the old Roman Saturnalia than the northern Protestants. Mrs Hugh Fraser, Edwardian diplomat's wife, remembered a Christmas spent in Rome as a young girl in the 1880s. The festival she describes visually, at least, recalls the feast of Saturn, Roman god of agriculture, which in pre-Christian Rome was celebrated from December 17th to the 19th: 'The year began for us with the first Sunday in Advent, when hundreds of Pifferari, the bagpipe players from the mountains of Romagna and the kingdom of Naples, entered the city in little companies to play their wild, haunting music before the many street shrines, where, in those days of faith, the lamps were kept burning and the flowers fresh all year round.'
Christmas fairs are still held during Advent all over northern Europe – particularly throughout the densely populated heartland of northern France, Germany and the Low Countries. When the population of Europe was still largely agricultural and dependent on the seasons, this was a fine time of year for a fair. People had put up the winter preserves, filled their larder from the pig-killing, and were ready to think about next year. Seasonal workers had their harvest-money to spend.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION,
DECEMBER,
Christmas and New Year: Winter Festivals of Renewal,
Advent,
St Nicholas,
St Lucia,
Scandinavian Christmas Cold Table,
Christmas in Germany,
An English Christmas,
Southern Christmas,
St Stephen/Boxing Day,
JANUARY,
New Year,
Epiphany,
St Vincent,
Burns' Night,
Christenings,
FEBRUARY,
Candlemas,
Valentine's Day,
Carnival and Pre-Lent,
Lofoten Cod Festival,
MARCH,
Lent,
Mothering Sunday,
APRIL,
All Fools' Day,
Western Easter,
Easter in Lapland,
Eastern Easter,
St Mark,
St George,
MAY,
Walpurgis Night and May Day,
Corpus Christi,
JUNE,
Whitsun/Pentecost,
Rose Harvest,
St Anthony,
Midsummer St John,
Weddings,
JULY,
July Pilgrimages,
Sheep-shearing,
AUGUST,
Swedish Crayfish Festival,
The Glorious Twelfth,
The Assumption,
Honey Harvest,
SEPTEMBER,
Oyster Harvest,
Spice Harvest,
Maize Harvest,
Chestnut Harvest,
Cork Harvest,
Michaelmas,
Grape Harvest,
OCTOBER,
Kermesse, Kirchweih and Volksfest,
Harvest-home,
Hallowe'en, All Saints, All Souls, Bonfire Night,
NOVEMBER,
St Hubert,
Pig-killing,
Truffle Harvest,
Olive Harvest,
Funeral Feasts,
BIBLIOGRAPHY,
GENERAL INDEX,
INDEX OF RECIPES,